Sweetening Ontologies Cont'd: Aligning Bottom-Up with Top-Down Ontologies

This paper addresses an issue at the interface between language and ontology. Specifically, we report the results of the alignment we performed between the T-PAS ([1]) and DOLCE categories ([2]), and discuss the distinctions and similarities we observed from a cognitive and application-based perspective. The motivation for our work lies in the different nature of the two resources; while T-PAS is a bottom-up system, in which semantic types are identified by manual clustering the fillers of argument positions of verbs gathered from large corpora, DOLCE is top-down ontology, in which categories are not based on extensive linguistic evidence and are stipulated on formal grounds. The preliminary results of the alignment task reveal that the most general types in T-PAS can be mapped fairly well into DOLCE’s upper level. Two substantial issues remain open, the mapping of the Abstract category and the treatment of systematic polysemy. The experiment also assesses the anthropic character of the bottom-up system compared to the top-down system, and the fine-grained granularity of the first compared to the second. On the other hand, the taxonomy of DOLCE is ontologically more solid than the T-PAS hierarchy. The resulting alignment benefits both sides.